Repeating Lies Doesn’t Make Them Truth

Education and Donald Trump top the AZ Republic’s scams

We’re only one week into the new year and President-elect Donald Trump has not quite two weeks before his inauguration, but that doesn’t stop the folks at the Arizona Republic from engaging in deceptive use of the English language.

The newspaper’s scheme brings to mind Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s best seller “1984.”  A clerk in the government’s Ministry of Truth Records Department, Smith’s job was to rewrite historical documents to align with the constantly changing current political deception. Newspeak, a reduced language became the tool to limit free thought and concepts posing a threat to the totalitarian regime. Any form of thought alternative to the party’s construct was classified as “thought crime,” “crime think,” or “doublethink.” Smith’s work included manipulating facts, revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs to remove “unpersons,” the term used to describe people who had fallen out of favor with the party.

In these cases however, it is not a regime or party but the newspaper itself that engages in the deception. In advance of today’s State of the State address, Sunday’s edition used the front page to take Gov. Doug Ducey to task on the issue of education. The headline: “With his term half over, Ducey under pressure to go big.” Would the liberals pumping out these ludicrous stories have referred Democrat Gov. Janet Napolitano using those words two years into her first term?  How about Barack Obama?  Not a chance.  They saw two more years and a second term ahead for the Democrats.

Sunday’s edition also carried an editorial, “Ariz. Schools need real help,” in which they quote their own reporter as well as cite left-wing polling data. It’s not a mystery that subscriptions to this rag are on life support.

Education has become a hot issue for the educrats. Not only is it underfunded, it is underfunded. This is not a typo, just making a point.  It has become the norm for school districts to continually hold bond override elections, “for the children” or to “get more money into the classroom” —  specifically the teacher’s paycheck. The Arizona Lottery was sold to voters in Nov. 1980 as a means of putting millions yearly into education. The City of Phoenix has a Democrat mayor who ran on making education a priority, despite the fact that elected city officials play no role in shaping education policy — typically the realm of the state government and school districts. Greg Stanton has moved past those vague promises, now throwing his hat in the ring for the under-the-radar post of Secretary of State, a frequent backdoor route to the governor’s office.

Voters are getting tired of having to live within their means while the school districts continually cry out for more money. As a result, ballot overrides, once considered sacrosanct, have begun failing.

Proposition 123 a massive increase in education funding, pushed by Gov. Ducey, was a nail-biter for several days, since the vote margins were razor-thin. The final result was 50.8 percent in favor to 49.2 percent opposed to the measure. State Treasurer Jeff DeWit was an adamant opponent, saying there was ample money to fund education without raiding the State Land Trust Fund or raising property taxes.

Sunday’s edition of the newspaper also rolled out a commentary by propagandist Linda Valdez, who never saw an illegal she didn’t prefer to a U.S. Citizen. Her rant includes these odd words: “Millions of families in the United States are living in fear because of Donald Trump’s rise to power.” Apparently she missed the fact that he is not an apparition, but was elected to the presidency of the United States.  Then she pulls out the old canard, that these (illegal) families “face catastrophic separations.“ The oft-repeated lie is outrageous. Nothing stops parents returning to their homeland from taking their American-born children with them. She describes a grandnephew of hers — “a child” —too fearful to sleep.

Nowhere does she mention the hordes of children sent into the U.S. alone and under deplorable conditions by their own parents, who know they will be links to the outlandish practice of chain migration also known as family reunification. Valdez conveniently forgets Jose who illegally crosses into the U.S. for work, sending money home to Maria and the ninos, until his new honey becomes pregnant and Jose forgets about his old family south of the border. How about a column on that practice, Linda?